| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Telecommunications software and services, web conferencing and video conferencing |
| Founded | October 1998 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California (United States) |
| Key people | Jeffrey M Cavins (Chief Executive Officer); Peter V. Sperling (Chairman and Co-Founder); David F. Hofstatter (Former Chief Executive Officer and co-Founder) |
| Products | Fuze Meeting; Fuze Messenger; Fuze Telepresence Connect |
| Employees | ~80 (November 2010) |
| Website | www.fuzebox.com |
FuzeBox, Inc. (formerly CallWave, Inc. and Fuze Box, Inc.) is a provider of Internet and mobile based unified communications solutions.
Founded in 1998, FuzeBox is a private company headquartered in San Francisco, California with offices in Santa Barbara, California and Sofia, Bulgaria.
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FuzeBox was founded as CallWave by Robert A. Dolan, Peter Sperling, David Trandel, and David F. Hoffstatter in 1998. The team secured $30 million in venture funding and then led the company to profitability in three years of operations. In 2004, CallWave achieved approximately $40 million in revenues with $12 million in net earnings. Hofstatter took CallWave public in September 2004 under the NASDAQ ticker name CALL.[1]
CallWave launched their first product, FaxWave, one of the early fax-to-email services. In October 1999, CallWave released Internet Answering Machine™ (IAM)[2] – a free service that allowed a user to view caller information and listen to a voicemail without being disconnected from their dial-up connection. Within 4 months, there were 1 million subscribers using the free service.[3] In March 2001, the company became profitable,[2] and in April 2001,[2] CallWave converted IAM from a free to paid service. Due to the profitability of Internet Answering Machine™, CallWave abandoned their original plans to provide broadband voice to desktops in favor of pursuing internet telephony.
Under Hoffstatter, CallWave experienced a steady decline in sales and profits including losses for the years 2006 through 2008. Sales declined to $20 million with a net loss of $5.6 million in 2008.[4] The stock price dropped to under $1 in early 2009, thus failing to meet NASDAQ minimum standards.[5]
In August 2008, CallWave acquired mobile instant messaging client Web Messenger .[6] and in November of that year, relaunched the product as Fuze Messenger. In May 2009, CallWave announced the release of their web conferencing software, Fuze Meeting, for desktop and mobile devices.
On July 3, 2009, CallWave renamed the company FuzeBox, bought back all public shares and delisted itself from NASDAQ.[1][7]
In January 2010, FuzeBox launched movie-editing software Fuze Movie.,[8] and in March 2010 the company launched third party Twitter client, Tweetshare.[9] As of Q4, 2010, the company had over 2.3 [10] million subscribers to their platform. The company continues to launch products and services in effort to support their mission to be the next generation visual collaboration leader.
Fuze Meeting is an online meeting, video conferencing and collaboration software package that enables users to host and attend web based conferences and share their desktop screen with other remote users via the web and mobile devices. Fuze Meeting is browser-based, built on Flash with its own proprietary back-end technologies. It allows meetings on Mac, Windows, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, Android phones, and Android tablets.[11][12][13] Standard conference bridge and cloud-based storage is also available.
An IM consolidation tool for iPhone and BlackBerry phones.[14]
Fuze Telepresence Connect is a telepresence gateway for H.323, SIP and H.264 audio-visual communication systems (Polycom, Tandberg and LifeSize) to connect to personal devices such as iPad, Android tablets, PC’s and Apple computers. Fuze Telepresence Connect also integrates with FuzeBox's cloud-based Fuze Meeting collaboration platform to bring web conferencing features into telepresence environments. [15] Some of its key features include HD multi-party video conferencing, error resilience, resolution and rate matching and support for video standards. [16]